In this article

Microsoft 365 usage analytics

In this article

Microsoft 365 usage analytics is also available for Office 365 US Government Community.

Overview of Microsoft 365 usage analytics

Use Microsoft 365 usage analytics within Power BI to gain insights on how your organization is adopting the various services within Office 365 to communicate and collaborate. You can visualize and analyze Office 365 usage data, create custom reports and share the insights within your organization and gain insights into how specific regions or departments are utilizing Office 365.

Microsoft 365 usage analytics is a content pack that gives you access to a pre-built dashboard that provides a cross-product view of the last 12 months and contains a number of pre-built reports. Each report provides you with specific usage insights. User specific information is available for the last full calendar month.

The data model that powers the content pack includes user attributes that from Active Directory, enabling the ability to pivot in certain reports. The following Active Directory attributes are included: location, department and organization.

Microsoft 365 usage analytics contains a number of reports, including:

Adoption overview report — offers an all-up summary of adoption trends. Use the reports in this section to learn how your users have adopted Office 365as well as how overall usage of the individual services has changed month-over-month. You can see how many licenses are assigned, how many of those are in active use by people in your organization, how many users are returning users and how many are using the product for the first time.

Product usage report — offers a drill-down view into volume of key activities for each service. Use the reports in this section to learn how your users are utilizing Office 365.

Storage used report — Use this report to track cloud storage for mailboxes, OneDrive and SharePoint sites. You can use this to make sure people in your organization stay within limits, or to decide if you need to purchase more storage resources.

Communication report — You can see at a glance whether people in your organization prefer to stay in touch by using Teams, Yammer, email, or Skype calls. You can observe if there are shifts in patterns of use of communication tools amongst your employees.

Collaboration report — See how people in your organization use OneDrive and SharePoint to store documents and collaborate with each other, and how these trends evolve month over month. You can also see how many people share documents internally or externally and how many SharePoint sites or OneDrive accounts are actively being used.

Office activation report — Track Office 365 ProPlus, Project and Visio activations in your organization. Each person with an Office license can install products on up to five devices. Use reports in this section to see the device types on which people have installed Office apps.

Access from anywhere report — Track which clients and devices people use to connect to email, Skype for Business, or Yammer.

Individual service usage reports — Usage reports are available for certain individual services. These reports provide specific usage details for the respective service. Exchange usage, Teams usage, and Yammer usage are examples of these reports.

FAQ

Is this content pack going to be available through purchase or will it be free?

The content pack is available to all customers free of charge. You need to sign up for the free Power BI service to connect to the content pack. You can also customize the dashboards and reports with the free Power BI service.

To share the dashboards with others both the user who is sharing and the user the dashboard is shared with must have Power BI Pro or Power BI Premium.

Who can connect to Microsoft 365 usage analytics?

You have to be either a global administrator, report reader, Exchange administrator, Skype for Business administrator, or SharePoint administrator in order to establish the connection to the content pack. See Office 365 admin roles for more information.

Can I only customize the dashboards and reports from the Power BI web interface?

In addition to customizing the dashboard and reports from the Power BI web interface, users can also use Power BI Desktop to connect directly to the Office 365 reporting service to build their own reports.

How can I get the pbit file that this dashboard is associated with?

You can access to the pbit file from the Microsoft Download center.

Who can view the dashboards and reports?

If you connected to the content pack, you can share it with anybody by using the sharing functionality. Power BI licensing requires that both the user sharing and the user with whom a dashboard is shared have Power BI Pro or Power BI Premium.

Can anyone share the dashboard, or does it have to be the person who connected to the dashboard?

When sharing the dashboard, you can either allow users to re-share the dashboard with others or not. You can set this option at the time of sharing.

Is it possible to work on and customize the same content pack with a group of people?

For which timeframe is data available?

The majority of the reports display data for the previous 12 months. However, some of the charts may show less history since the data collection for different products and reports were started at different times and thus data for the full 12 months might not be available. All the reports will eventually build up to 12 months of history. Reports that show user level details show data for the previous complete month.

What data is included in the content pack?

The data in the content pack currently covers the same set of activity metrics available in the Activity Reports. As reports are added to the activity reports, they will be added to the content pack in a future release.

How does the data in the content pack differ from the data in the usage reports?

The underlying data you see in the content pack matches the data you see in the activity reports in the Office 365 admin center. The key differences are that in the admin portal data is available for the last 7/30/90/180 days while the content pack presents data on a monthly basis for up to 12 months.

In addition, user level details in the content pack are only available for the last complete month for users who were assigned a product license and performed an activity.

When should I use the content pack and when the usage reports?

The Activity Reports are a good starting point to understand usage and adoption of Office 365. The content pack combines the Office 365 usage data and your organization’s Active Directory information and enables admins to analyze the data set using the visual analytics capabilities of Power BI. This enables admins to not just visualize and analyze Office 365 usage data, but also slice it by Active Directory properties such as departments, location etc. They can also create custom reports and share the insights within their organization.

How often is the data refreshed?

When you connect to the content pack for the first time, it will automatically populate with your data for the previous 12 months. After that, the content pack data will refresh weekly. Customers can choose to modify the refresh schedule if their use of this data demands a different update rhythm.

The back-end Office 365 service will refresh data on a daily basis and provides data that is between 5-8 days latent from the current date.

The Content date column in each dataset represents the freshness date of the data in the content pack.

How is an active user defined?

The definition of active user is the same as the definition of active user in the activity reports.

What SharePoint site collections are included in the SharePoint reports?

The current version of the content pack includes file activity from SharePoint team sites and SharePoint group sites.

Which groups are included in the Office 365 Groups usage report?

The current version of the content pack includes usage from Outlook groups, Yammer groups, and SharePoint groups. It does not include groups related to Microsoft Teams or Planner.

When will an updated version of the content pack become available?

Major changes to the content pack will be released twice a year which may include new reports or new data. Minor changes to the reports may be released on a more frequent basis.

Is it possible to integrate the data from the content pack into existing solutions?

The data in the content pack can be retrieved through the Office 365 APIs (in preview). When they ship to production they will be merged within the Microsoft Graph reporting APIs.

Are there plans to expand the content pack to show usage data from other Microsoft products?

How can I pivot by company information in Active Directory?

Company information is included one of the Active Directory fields in the content pack and you can see it as a pre-built filter in the Product User activity reports. It is available as column in the UserState table.

Is it possible to bring in additional fields from Active Directory?

Additional customization on this data is possible by connecting to the Microsoft Graph reporting APIs to pull additional fields from Azure Active Directory and join to the dataset.

Is it possible to aggregate the information in the content pack across multiple subscriptions?

At this time, the content pack is for a single subscription, as it is associated with the credentials that was used to initially connect to it.

Is it possible to see usage by plan (i.e. E1, E3)?

In the content pack, usage is represented at the per product level. Data about the various subscriptions that are assigned to users are provided, however it is not possible to correlate user activity to the subscription assigned to user.

Is it possible to integrate other data sets into the content pack?

You can use Power BI Desktop to connect to the Office 365 APIs (in preview) to bring additional data sources to combine with the content pack data.